Photo Post-Processing Quiz — Test Your Editing Knowledge

RAW is the unprocessed data from your sensor, giving you maximum latitude to adjust exposure, white balance, and tone in post-processing. JPEG is a processed, compressed format that is ready to share but offers less room to recover detail. RAW files are larger but preserve more information.

A histogram is a graph of tones in your image, from dark on the left to bright on the right. It shows where your exposure sits and helps you catch blown highlights or crushed shadows before you leave the scene. Learning to read a histogram removes guesswork from exposure.

White balance correction shifts the temperature (blue to amber) and tint (green to magenta) of an image so that things that should be white or gray look neutral. That removes color casts from light sources such as tungsten bulbs or shade. It changes color, not overall brightness, and it works best on raw files.

Clipping means some tones fall outside the range the file can record, so they become pure white or pure black with no detail. On a histogram it shows as data piled against the right or left edge. Clipped highlights in a JPEG cannot be recovered; a raw file sometimes holds a little more.

Lens correction applies a profile of a lens's known flaws to undo barrel or pincushion distortion, darkened corners (vignetting) and color fringing. Editing software matches the profile using the lens data stored in the file. It cannot change the focal length or angle of view that was captured.

Clarity raises local contrast in the midtones, which strengthens edges and texture without pushing the brightest and darkest tones the way a global contrast change would. It works over a wider area than sharpening, so it adds punch rather than fine edge detail. Too much makes skin look gritty.

Non-destructive editing preserves the original file by storing all adjustments as instructions applied on top of it rather than baked into the pixels. Every change remains fully reversible, and the original can be restored or re-processed from scratch at any time.

The Highlights slider mainly changes the bright tones below pure white, so it is used to recover detail in skies or bright skin. The Whites slider moves the very brightest tones, which sets the white point and controls clipping. Both work on any file type, though raw files give more room.

Sharpening increases the contrast between adjacent pixels at edges, making boundaries appear crisper. It compensates for softness introduced by the sensor's anti-aliasing filter, the demosaicing process, and any slight camera or subject motion during capture.

Exporting applies all stored editing instructions to the original pixel data and writes the result to a new output file at the size, format, and quality settings chosen. The original raw or source file remains unchanged in the catalog.